Lit Fest 2025

Advanced weeklong workshops include those with Steve Almond, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Eduardo Corral, Paul Harding, Mat Johnson, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Elizabeth McCracken, Eileen Myles, Helen Phillips, Tony Tulathimutte, and Matthew Zapruder.

Publishing was a fast-changing industry even before consolidation, a global pandemic, and the advent of AI, so what does the publishing landscape look like now? Join four industry experts as they discuss how publishing has changed, what remains standard practice, what today’s landscape means for writers, and more.

Psychedelic writing plays with time and space and perspective, blurs waking and dreaming life, multiplies and distorts the possibilities of narrative. It’s lush and daring and monumental; it finds sublimity and absurdity in the ordinary; it cannot be contained by genre labels. Through hybrid readings that conjure the language and ethos of the psychedelic experience, we’ll consider strange and mysterious routes to the center of states that can be impossible to write straightforwardly or linearly: the infinitude of grief, the obliteration of the self through sex and childbirth, the weirdness of aging, cycles of trauma and desire, chronic pain, transition, spiritual transcendence. We’ll take inspiration from authors like Venita Blackburn, Anne de Marcken, and Helen Phillips, who explore themes of loss and transcendence by folding the world and their work into exquisite and inexplicable shapes on the page. This seminar will urge you to break form and turn words inside out as a means of describing self-shattering conditions and the realities of our twisted present—which, it often feels, can only be contemplated clearly through a warped lens.

Writers can become so compelled by the inner lives of their characters that they, the characters, become like fireflies trapped in jars. In this seminar we will talk about how to think about the physical in fiction—keeping characters in their bodies, in rooms, and on the face of the earth—and try our hands at exercises that help us think about gesture, interaction, action, and consequence. Your characters may never raise their eyebrows again.

Even though people think about sex all the time, and even have it occasionally, writers tend to shy away from the subject. Which is crazy. Because sex is the one experience that makes us all hopeful and horny and embarrassed and vulnerable. In this freewheeling afternoon, we’ll look at the work of Mary Gordon, James Salter, and other literary horndogs in an effort to figure out how to infuse our own sex scenes with genuine emotion and ecstatic sensation, not evasions and porn clichés. Arrive ready to lay your characters bare.

Come with an open mind, leave with pages and pages (and pages) of fresh writing! In this generative class, our magical box of props, prompts, and writing activities will infuse your writing with new energy, sending you in exciting new directions. Exercises will be in 3-5 minute sprints, each inspired by a different source of inspiration to explore. Open to writers of all genres who are looking for inspiration and fun.

In this seminar, we'll infuse law into our fiction, memoir, or nonfiction, without sounding like an info dump cut from Law & Order. Explore nuances in courtroom scenes, and add social justice as a timestamp. Law is human conflict. Whether history, classic tales, speculative, or contemporary stories, we'll find strategies to imbue your work with intriguing legal dimensions while using prompts from films, nonfiction, and fiction.

Trying to build your platform to sell your memoir book proposal? This seminar will give writers tools on how to brainstorm a variety of reported essay angles for their main personal story, craft pitches for reported stories that include the right balance of research and connection to readers, and find the editors’ contact and get their attention. We'll examine sample pitches that helped the instructor land research-backed essays in the New York Times, Guardian, Vogue, and CNBC which helped boost her credibility as an expert and in turn promote her book.

Many of us remember the pleasure of writing and receiving letters, the way an evolving correspondence could deepen our understanding of our correspondent and ourselves. In this generative poetry seminar, we'll activate our letter writing skills to create poems that tap into the dimensions of a letter. Using models by Victoria Chang, Eve Ewing, William Carlos Williams, Catherine Wing, and others, we'll explore the possibilities of the epistle—how it compresses exposition, makes room for complex relationships, allows for both distance and intimacy. Once we cross the threshold of speaker, audience, and premise, we’ll be on our way!

Come with a blank page, and leave with the vital elements of a brand new short story. In this generative session, we'll try to outrun the inner critic, while drawing on the techniques of great writers to create compelling character, meaningful conflict, and economical depth.

Come with a blank page, and leave with the vital elements of a brand-new short story. In this generative session, we'll try to outrun the inner critic, while drawing on the techniques of great writers to create compelling character, meaningful conflict, and economical depth.

When you write a story, do you find it hard to get things off the ground? Does your middle sag? Do you have problems sticking your ending? In this two-hour craft intensive, we'll consider how structure and shape can help resolve these problems, making your story more focused and more propulsive. We’ll discuss the elements of good beginnings, middles, and endings—the basic building blocks of structure—and figure out how to use these elements to move readers through your stories. We’ll consider story shape—both classic shapes and those which might already be inherent in our drafts, just waiting to be revealed. How might story shape suggest directions for your story? How might it be used to create surprise? Bring a project you’d like to work on, and come prepared to read, discuss, reflect, and write.

We'll be collaboratively reading through a Raymond Carver story line-by-line to see at the most granular level what goes into putting a story together. What does the reader need to know, and when? How does a story progress? How do we use symbolism in non-pretentious ways? We’ll save some time for writerly questions towards the end.

Come and celebrate the hard work of the Poetry Collective graduates, hear some of their final work, and learn more about the year-long program.

Hear your favorite visiting author perform their recent works. Shop at the Lit Fest pop-up bookstore operated by The Bookies and get your book signed afterward.

Stick around after the Visiting Authors Reading for a lively edition of Denver's latest reading series, Reading Den, featuring Lit Fest authors from Colorado and beyond.